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26 November 2015

The first day of the conference.

Hotel room is good, comfortable bed, hot water, good food.
Kisumu is a fish area it is right on the shore of Victoria lake, so I am having
fish everyday

The day started off with an explanation and apology about the
misunderstand that occurred yesterday, I appreciated it and accepted it and we
moved on.

I had a fantastic day today. The conference was very
fruitful. A real interaction between cultures. The people are from, obviously
from Bondo , but also from other universities in Kenya, from Congo DRC, Uganda,
Netherlands and me (from Israel). It is very small so we have a lot of
opportunity for real discussion, and real brainstorming.

The conference is about technological transfer and cultural
interface. This is a very interesting subject which raises many questions. The main
question which we are trying to answer is how can Africa take from the west
technology which is appropriate for her and combine it with its own set of
values. Or must technological adoption come with an adoption of the values of
where it was designed or innovated. Big question. We will see where this takes
us.

We are talking about the contributions Africa can make to
the world. We discussed the openness of Africa to things that we do not accept
in the west, there is no one or right answer for issues, there is more than two
beings, of male and female, I am told that there are 12 in the bantu culture. And
many other issues are being discussed. Religion is viewed very differently than
it is viewed in many western cultures, there is more room for openness and less
dogma. We are going very deep here……(loving it), I even learnt something about
Jewishness, from our host. That in the Jewish faith it is a way of life, not
dogma or just a faith, as well as it looks to the future. Obviously we in Israel
feel very differently about this statement, we feel that there is much coercion
in religion, but then I thought about ashkenazi and sphardic, thinking that we
always say that if we can adopt the sphardic way, in which Jewish meant culture
and a way of life it would be all different and less over bearing. And that the
dichotomy of being religious or secular actually came from Europe, and put us
in a spot where we must choose, it was a total non-issue in the northern African
countries or the sphardic culture, where it was just a way of life, the
secular/non secular issue has only been adopted recently by them as well, from
the ashkenazi. Very interesting stuff.

So much more to talk about, but it might get too boring so I
will stop.

Two very nice Kenyan traditions: what we call a coffee break
is called here a Health break, I thought this is a marvelous terminology, first
time I heard it. And for their tea they have Milk water, which is actually milk
diluted with water, great innovation. there are also diffrent kinds of ways of showing apprecition and clapping, really nice, difficult to discribe. loving this.

On our health break we got tea with milk water, a kind of
sweet doughnut, and yams…..